Japan will face the robotic jobocalypse head-on, by mastering robots before they master us

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Japanese President Shinzo Abe announced this week that Japan will be making robotics one of the country’s most important economic pillars — and he plans to kick off that effort with a “Robot Olympics” staged in 2020. He wants to triple the size of the Japanese robotics industry, and make Japan once again the island from which the most amazing technological devices flow. With the country’s automotive and electronics industries no longer able to buoy the country all on their own, this is an explicit attempt to shore up an economy and workforce against a future in which up to half of all professions could be automated out of existence.

In a way, though, this is a debate that has been ongoing since before the invention of the loom: is technology about to put us all out of a job? Most of those who have historically answered Yes to that question have been proven to be alarmists, and for the past hundred years most economists have assumed that while new technologies do destroy old markets they also necessarily create new ones to compensate. Today, that view is falling back before the simple reality that robots and software solutions threaten all sorts of professions — from truckers to telemarketers to warehouse labourers — and that there is simply no reason to think that these innovations will stimulate any large new job market. It really doesn’t seem like you can beat the robots — and so, perhaps the solution is to join them.

Robots like these will likely drive the majority of industry growth — for a while.

That’s the plan anyway, and Japan is better positioned to dominate the still-emerging market for high-end robotics than just about anybody else. The Japanese workforce is used to the idea of a manufacturing- and technology-based economy, and already has large, adaptable assembly plants ready to go. The world is trained to think of Japanese tech as bleeding-edge — you’ll still hear people in North America spreading silly rumours of secret Asian super phones that make the Galaxy S5 look like a Razr flip phone. People both in and out of Japan are primed for the country to once again take a lead in future-tech.

The proposed Robot Olympics is still somewhat vague, but Abe says he wants to gather “all of the world’s robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills.” This is broadly similar to many other robot challenges that have existed for some time, but if Japan can glamorize the event and, above all, make the events seem relevant to a robot’s progression toward real-world usefulness, it could enjoy greater success than those forebears. Technology is sexy today in a way it has never been before; while the public is still unlikely to embrace robot soccer to any great extent, a competition to clean a house as quickly as possible might engender a wider level of interest.

The robotics industry in general is expected to undergo between 6% and 10% growth per year for at least the next 10 years. That’s going to come from all over the market, but mostly from service and industrial sectors. Some firms have projected as much as $100 billion in total growth by 2020 — though that’s assuming annual increases of more than 15%, which is optimistic. In general, “service robotics” is a much more volatile market since it relies partially on consumer preference — industrial robotics are much easier to forecast, as they rely mostly on a company’s reliable wish to lower overhead and increase profits. [Read: Amazon deploys 10,000 robot workers, a year after Obama’s famous Amazon jobs speech.]

I will never, under any circumstances, let this into my home.

Then again, many Japanese corporations have proven to be rather tone-deaf when it comes to the wants of the non-Asian market. A cultural obsession with robots may be a major stumbling block for Japanese designers, many of whom seem oddly intent on creating creepy human replacements as opposed to purely functional home-helper machines. Additionally, the tightly controlled Japanese research sector may not be able to compete with the more open and collaborative North American approach, in which it is easier for ideas (and more importantly people) to be passed around and used for progress across the industry as a whole. [Read: Do humans dream of android prostitutes?]

Assuming that there is a possible solution to the problem of employment in the future, Japan seems as well poised as anyone to find it. If the country is particularly successful in doing so, it could realistically suck up a majority of the overall global robotics market — and leave those of us in less forward-thinking countries looking longingly at the land of the rising sun.

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